The fact that we’re divided by religion always strikes me as odd, but it’s always a great way to sow division between people.
There’s an immediate division between those who have religion and those who don’t. Obviously, there are also different religions, but as if this didn’t offer enough possibilities for division, there are even divisions within religions.
What a tangled web we weave.
I’m sure religion must be a big favourite among those who want to see the people divided for their own gain. Just for the breathtaking irony that some of the most unpleasant people you could hope to find are often those making the biggest song and dance about their chosen religion.
When the real truth of the matter is that very often, those who shout loudest about their love of God and their chosen religion are the ones who have the least faith.
Just consider a terrorist group like Islamic State, also known as ISIS, that held large parts of Syria and Iraq in its heyday. They claimed to be devout Muslims, but the most prominent members were just a bunch of psychopaths revelling in the freedom of being able to murder with impunity.
We can see this in less extreme circumstances, just within our own societies. It’s astonishing how some people who claim to be devoutly religious can be the most unpleasant people we meet. I’m not sure any religion teaches hatred, yet that doesn’t stop some self-proclaimed believers from hating on others.
Those who really have faith know that they don’t have to take things into their own hands. God, if you believe, is literally the most powerful entity in the universe, because God created the universe. Even in polytheistic religions, it’s not unusual for there to be one or two gods that created everything and so must have the ultimate power.
So most religions centre on one or more omnipotent beings who see and know everything and control all the power of the universe.
Doesn’t it seem a bit narcissistic when a human being believes that God needs them to intervene on their behalf in any way?
Surely if God wants something to happen, God can take care of it, without needing to rely on a weak human?
Focusing on just the Abrahamic God, shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims. According to numbers from the Bible, he killed 2,821,364 people, though with estimates for events where the Bible didn’t include figures, he killed up to 25 million people.1
Clearly, this is no shrinking violet of a God who needs human assistance when it comes to handing out punishment. Just look at those numbers.
Just a Few Bad Apples?
While there are some very nasty people who claim to be devoutly religious, they’re in the minority. It’s a minority who see their religious beliefs as elevating them above others and into a position of privilege that allows them to demand others comply with their beliefs.
People are people and most religious people are happy with their own religious beliefs and happy for their neighbour to believe whatever they believe.
While the city of Jerusalem is generally seen as a source of division, it wasn’t always so. For several hundred years up to the 11th century, the city had Muslim rulers, but Jews and Christians were allowed to live and practice their own religions there. Considering they worship the same God, it kind of seems obvious that they should be able to live happily together, but it seems you need the right leaders to make it happen.
Despite the situation in modern-day Jerusalem, that spirit from the old city does still exist today. I’m sure there are many places where the religions mix freely without friction, but we can see one concrete example in the Indian city of Kolkata.
From a Jewish population once in the thousands, today the city’s Jews number in the low double figures. So few that the three synagogues no longer conduct regular services on the Sabbath and would probably have closed completely, if not for the city’s Muslim population. For generations, it has been Muslim caretakers who have tended to these buildings and kept them in a state ready for use when needed.2
Doesn’t that seem like the actions of truly religious people?
Regardless of your own personal views on religions, don’t you feel that these such people, the true believers of their religions, deserve our respect?
Shouldn’t we all be free to believe what we want, as long as that doesn’t cause hurt or harm to others?
Unfortunately, the actions of the most extreme “followers” of a religion tend to shape the views of many towards all the followers. So psychopaths rampaging through the Middle East claiming to be devout Muslims tarnish our views of true Muslims. And because the media wants to strike a blow against such non-religious terrorists, they insult the truly religious.
Every time a newspaper or magazine publishes a cartoon of Muhammad, the only people hurt by it are true Muslims. The bearded psychopaths delight in it as it gives them more justification for waging ever more terror and shedding ever more blood.
What Does God Really Want?
The most extreme insist that they know what God wants from humankind based on writings that go back centuries and millennia. However, some do tend to have a habit of picking and choosing the laws and rules they most like.
At this point, it would be easy to highlight this by having a bit of a laugh at Christians about some of the ancient laws from the Old Testament of the Bible. I believe the first five books are lifted straight from the Tanakh, just re-ordered, so I guess we could also have a bit of a giggle at the expense of Jews too.
I like to think I’m above such things though, but if you’re not, there was a scene in the TV show The West Wing which should be a fine starting point for your research on the subject.3
To further suggest that the extremists might not really know what God wants, I could focus on Christians again and point out how the New Covenant replaces the Old Covenant.
It’s a more long-haired and guitar-strumming view of Christianity than the sin and be damned attitude God started out with. Through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, we were all absolved of all sin, past present and future, as long as we have faith in God.
So, regardless of what laws may have been in place originally, The New Covenant essentially offers a free pass to everyone who places their faith in God. Feels a lot more like a Hugh Hefner4 kind of religion, rather than Mary Whitehouse.5
Have you heard the good news? You don’t have to continue accusing gay people of sinning in the eyes of God, because he changed his point-of-view several thousands of years ago.
Or did he?
How do we know God ever considered homosexuality a sin?
Who wrote the Bible, Tanakh and Quran?
Christians and Jews both believe that the first five books of the Bible and Tanakh were written by Moses, who was being dictated to by God. More than 1,270 years before the birth of Jesus Christ or, to put it another way, about 3,000 years ago.
So obviously no witnesses are still around, other than God, and no real evidence. Have you ever played the Telephone Game? It’s a typical party icebreaker where people stand in line and repeat a word or phrase working from one end to the other, with the aim being for the person at the far end of the line to repeat the same word or phrase that the first player said. That gets pretty wacky when everyone’s in the same room at the same time. Imagine it stretching out over three millennia with millions of people taking part. The simple fact is that Christians and Jews have to rely on their faith to accept what they’ve been told.
And how did Moses really know it was God he met? A long white robe to hide the goat’s legs, the beard he wore at the (goat) kids’ hospital last Christmas and a wig to cover his horns and Satan could have been having a right laugh.
Might that possibly explain how, according to the Bible, God came to kill 25 million people vs 10 for Satan, and those 10 arguably with God’s blessing?
Yep, Satan killed just 10 people, Job’s kids.
Jemimah, Keziah, Keren-happuch, Rock Ryder, Dirk Banger, Vince Nailer, Big John Cannon, Major Mounts, Brick Suave and Axel Manly.6
It took you just moments to read the names of those Satan killed. If we did the same exercise with those the Bible says God killed, we’d still be here in almost four weeks time, assuming you don’t stop to eat or sleep.
Or fap. You can do your own research, but it does seem that God never explicitly said “thou shalt not fap”.
But maybe that’s because God didn’t really dictate it, and it was a nasty set-up job to discredit God. Though it did surprisingly poorly if that was the case.
And what about Muhammad and the Quran?
Let’s ignore the fact that God didn’t even turn up in person to dictate this, just sent his home-boy Gabriel. Even assuming Gabriel got all his “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” correct7, apparently Muhammad then didn’t think it was worth writing this stuff down. He shared it with others, some of whom possibly did write some stuff down at the time, but after Muhammad’s death, they were scratching around trying to remember everything he’d said about his chats with Gabriel so they could write the Quran. It wasn’t written in Muhammad’s lifetime.
So, I wonder how that played out?
“Do you remember that story about a kick-up-the-butt for a kick-up-the-butt?”
“Are you sure it was a kick-up-the-butt for a kick-up-the-butt?”
“I’d say 87% positive it was a kick-up-the-butt for a kick-up-the-butt.”
“Well, okay, but do you really think we can use that? Doesn’t that feel more like the tone of a steamy clay-back to read on the donkey train to Mecca, rather than the central religious text of the faith of Islam? Here, why don’t I ask Eric and Reg if they could maybe tweak it a bit, they’ve both got a way with words?”
“What, Eric the optician and Reg the dentist? Yeah, sure, if you like.”
Those of us who benefit from the gift of faith need to understand that as well as making our lives feel easier, our faith also drives our beliefs and values.
A definition of faith is “complete trust or confidence in someone or something”, but our faith in God is blind and without any proof. Is it really reasonable to impose our values onto others who don’t share the same faith?
Shouldn’t we all live and let live and let God handle things as they see right?
Shouldn’t courts of law be places where the aim is always to establish the facts as best as possible?
Recently, as I write this, the Supreme Court of Alabama passed a judgement that has implications for IVF treatment for people in the state having trouble conceiving. The Chief Justice, Tom Parker, said “Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”8
I’m sure you have views on IVF, but park them right now.
How does the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama know what God believes?
Sure, his faith gives him the confidence to believe he’s right. However, faith is blind. It comes without proof. Those of us who accept it, accept it willingly, but we also have to be aware that we may be wrong.
Shouldn’t a judge know the difference between facts and hearsay evidence, and know that the latter is inadmissible in a court of law?9
Isn’t it unreasonable for anyone to try and enforce their beliefs on others based on just their assumption that it’s God’s will?
If it is God’s will and if it is important to God that it’s dealt with on Earth, shouldn’t we respect God’s right to take care of it personally? The Christian one used to be very proactive in punishing those who behaved in ways he disagreed with.
And if God chooses not to deal with it on earth, God can spend eternity punishing the souls of the sinners for their earthly actions.
Anyone who truly has faith in God should feel comfortable with that, shouldn’t they?
I’ve rambled a bit there. I could probably have covered this in a single paragraph by sharing a quote from the author Dale Carnegie, though it appears to be a very light remix of one from the writer Samuel Johnson that I’ve already shared, but it seems too apt not to share here too.
“Even god doesn’t propose to judge a man till his last days, why should you and I?”
- If you do a quick search, you’ll find various different figures for how many he killed, but even the lowest figures I’ve seen see him comfortably make the top 10 of biggest mass murderers in history – https://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2010/04/drunk-with-blood-gods-killings-in-bible.html ↩︎
- https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2014/10/13/muslim-families-look-after-kolkata-synagogues ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CPjWd4MUXs ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Hefner ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Whitehouse ↩︎
- Okay, I had to make up some of those names as it seems only some of the children are actually named in the Bible – http://www.namenerds.com/uucn/porngen.html ↩︎
- If the idea of Gabriel making mistakes is distasteful to you, remember that we know angels are fallible – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Heaven ↩︎
- https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/us/alabama-ivf-tom-parker.html ↩︎
- https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-procedure/hearsay-evidence.html ↩︎